15 mei 2013

Thomas Demand #1


Thomas Demand: Studio, 1997. (bron: Whitehot Magazine)

In het geval van "Studio" van Thomas Demand heb ik me in de luren laten leggen door mijn eigen zoektermen. In dit geval is "Studio" geen atelier, maar een televisieset voor een programma voor de Duitse televisie in de jaren '70. Eigenlijk is het een foto van een naar een foto nagebouwde papieren televisieset. Iets meer over de werkwijze van Thomas Demand hieronder. (hk)

"In July Thomas Demand’s studio – set in a vast warehouse in the Mitte district of Berlin – was home to a 3m-tall replica of a church organ made from coloured paper. When I visited, the finishing touches were being made by the artist and his team of assistants, perfecting the thousands of pipes, pedals and meticulously recreated keys; a camera stand was positioned directly opposite, ready to capture the end result. Its construction had taken three months. Within the next week, however, this intricate model would be photographed, dismantled, destroyed and stuffed into a recycling bin. This is the brief lifespan of each of the German artist’s sculptures, which are created only to serve his final, large-scale photographs. ‘You have to destroy them straight away, otherwise you grow to like them,’ he says.
....
A centrepiece, though, will be the photograph of Demand’s replica church organ. Like all the other new works in the show, it was a project that the artist had planned before but had not yet realised: the theme of nationhood provided a perfect opportunity. It was inspired by a free-standing, open-air church organ – the largest of its kind in the world – built by FirstWorldWar veterans and situated in the small valley town of Kuftsein, on the Austrian-German border. At 12pm, every day since 1931, the same tune has been played on the organ – The Song of the Old Comrade – as a tribute to lost soldiers. The melody reverberated around the valley and could, apparently, be heard up to 10km away. The tradition continued uninterrupted until last November when, according to Demand, the organ was taken down to be rebuilt with digital workings. In a city such as Berlin, where memorials to the past are ubiquitous – from Peter Eisenman’s Holocaust monument to small plaques marking the spot where individuals were killed attempting to cross theWall – Demand describes the war veterans’ organ as ‘a beautiful, simple straightforward idea of making a memorial, rather than having a field of stones or a symbolic figure.’ Demand’s own version of the organ is therefore a memorial to a memorial that is losing much of its resonance due to the requirements of tourism. Yet Demand is aware that his work also falls almost comically short of the original: ‘if you make a picture of the instrument you completely miss its point, because the instrument is about the sound.’"

Thomas Demand outside his studio in the Mitte district of Berlin. He used to share the space with Olafur Eliasson and Tacita Dean. (bron: Blueprint Magazine, foto: Dominic Dupont, tekst: Peter Kelly)

> Thomas Demand

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